US members, Do you live in a tornado zone?

This map shows the locations of US tornadoes over the past 56 years. The eastern two thirds of the country looks unsafe to me, compared to the Rockies. I had imagined that tornado alley was a small swath, it looks more like half of the US.

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We don't get a lot of tornadoes in northeast Ohio, but some years back, we had an F-0 and an F-1 come through our town, and one or the other of them was strong enough to pull the roof off of the newly built grammar and Jr. High school. There wasn't a lot of other collateral damage, but that by itself was a hit on the community.

As climate change becomes more and more a reality, I genuinely wonder what is going to happen to these patterns.

Here in Chicago we are definitely in a tornado zone. I remember a few exceptional occasions during childhood when my parents shuffled us four kids downstairs to the southwest corner of our basement to wait out any possible dangers. One time we did experience a micro-burst that completely uprooted a neighbors tree and toppled a chimney. Other tree branches were thrust into our backyard lawn like javelin spears. This was right in the city where the houses are densely built at four feet apart. I've always taken the threat of tornadoes seriously.

I don't know if I live in a tornado zone or not but we do get tornadoes (and hurricanes, too.) In fact, just about anytime a storm blows up, tornado warnings go out. We now get telephone calls from the local disaster people warning us of bad weather. The bad thing is that most people in my area have no cellar so there is not a lot one can do to protect oneself.

It depends on how far Tallahassee is from the closest tornado tracks. It looks to me as if you''re not in the danger zone. (Just eyeballing a state map vs the tornado track map.) Some coastal areas seem safer than nearby inland.

So far there is no way to predict a "big one," or warn people to take cover, and there's not much you can do except hope you're not asleep and your house doesn't fall on you. And have emergency supplies on hand 24/7/365. The seismologists say the San Andreas needs to slip...soon. They've been saying that for more than 20 years. I try not to think about it.

PS: Looking at that Tornado Tracks Map, the first thing that came too my mind was, "What about Canada? And Mexico?" US weather maps p*ss me off sometimes....weather doesn't stop at the borders....

S'funny. I do tend to have occasional nightmares, but never about quakes.

I used to house-sit a lot, to get away from my family, and also supplement my tacky paychecks. One of my "clients" was a very large German shepherd who had grand mal epilepsy. She was usually okay if she got her meds on time, but sometimes she'd have a seizure for no apparent reason; plus, she slept on the (king size) bed with me, and I was terrified she'd have one, fall off the bed and break a leg in the middle of the night. So, a few times I did find myself jumping out of a rocking and rolling bed in the wee small hours, in full panic mode.

Heh! It was never a seizure or a quake, she was just scratching herself. Fleas.

One morning in 1971 my cat woke me up around 5 o'clock by standing on my chest and wailing. I thought he just had to go outside to pee (This was when it was still safe to let cats be indoor-outdoor around here. It isn't anymore.) I got up, let him out, went back to bed, and was reaching to turn my reading lamp off, when *WHAM!* It felt like the house dropped about 3 feet, the lights went out, there was a bright flash outside my window, and then the house started shaking like an off-balance washing machine. Totally dark. Felt like forever. I was moaning "Makeitstop-makeitstop!"

That was the Sylmar Quake.

I won't go into all the details...the kitchen was a mess, water slopped out of the pool in the back yard....and we didn't see Pookie for three days. We called and called and called. When he did show up he looked all raggedy, and he was mentally messed up. There were a lot of strong aftershocks for the next three months, and the Pook just got crazier and crazier. I think he blamed me for everything; peed on my mattress, and I had to send it out to be steam cleaned and rebuilt.

He finally slipped out and never came back. I looked everywhere, checked shelters, everything. Never saw him again. I grieved for a lonnng time.

But other people had it a lot worse than we did...Two hospitals had buildings full of patients that fell down. 55 people died.

Yeah, it was frightening, but I've never had dreams about quakes. Or if I have, I haven't remembered them. (Most of the dreams I remember are either really wacky, or very pleasant...dancing and skating in slo-mo, floating Axels, stuf like that.)

Thank you for your Sylmar Quake Pookie story. Sometime pets are resilient and sometimes not. We do the best we can with the information we have at the time. I know what you mean about grief. Even though I made mistakes out of ignorance, sometimes, with my cats, if they came to harm it caused a permanent painful memory and guilt and my grief was contaminated with feelings that I should have known what I could not have known. You couldn't have known Pooke had sensed an impending quake, and even if you had you wouldn't have been able to provide security or comfort.

Maybe we/I should open a discussion about oddball dreams. Or just dreams.

I have long thought (since the advent of time-share computers in the early 1980s) that most dreams are just the brain taking a "data dump;" getting rid of unnecessary or useless information. But they still interest me.

About Pookie, I think it was less than 2 minutes from the time he woke me up till the quake hit. I have heard other stories about animals of all kinds getting nervous, or behaving abnormally just before a quake.